À propos de la conférence
In this paper, I locate Tibetan refugee practices of sweater selling as a point of entry for understanding the ways in which road building continues to structure feeling in exiled landscapes, paying particular attention to the reconfiguring of kinship, temporality and movement within India. The practice of sweater knitting and selling sprung up in the context of the 95 road construction camps of the early 1960s, during which Tibetan women began knitting and selling sweaters as roadside hawkers in the lower regions of the foothills to generate additional income (Phuntsok 2020, 66). From the late 1980s onwards, sweater selling became the most prominent economic activity of Tibetan refugees within India, an activity that the Central Tibetan Administration estimates at least one member of each family continues to be involved in (Lau 2012, 98). Brian Larkin defines instructures as “built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space” (Larkin 2013, 327). Infrastructures are thus relational, comprising “the architecture for circulation” that undergirds everyday life (Ibid 328). As such, they are structuring objects, in turn enacting and halting particular movements, temporalities, aesthetics and affects (Ibid). What does an attunement to the intentional and unintentional rerouting – the manifold types of roads built, travelled, inhabited, protested and refused – by Tibetans within India reveal?
Bibliography
Lau, Timmy. 2012. “Sweater Business: Commodity Exchange and the Mediation of Agency in
the Tibetan Itinerary Sweater Trade in India,” in Moving Subjects, Moving Objects: Transnationalism, Cultural Production and Emotions. New York: Berghahn Books.
Larkin. Brian. 2013. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” The Annual Review of
Anthropology 42: 327-43.
Phuntsok, Tashi. 2020. “Livelihood Challenges in South Asia,” The Tibet Journal 45 (2): 51-81.
Zoom: https://ulaval.zoom.us/j/8892424519?pwd=TFBKS3ZmRFppZmVNWUZJaXBpR1djQT09
À propos de la conférencière : Khando Langri (Stanford University)
Khando Langri is a Tibetan writer, poet and PhD candidate in Stanford’s Department of Anthropology. Her research examines the lives of Tibetan refugees who worked as road construction labourers in northern India in the 1960s and 70s. She investigates how these displaced Tibetans cared for and cultivated spaces of beauty in roadside landscapes, and how such acts continue to suffuse contemporary circulations. More broadly, she is interested in how land dispossessed communities work, dwell, disrupt, dream and practice return amidst contexts of structural impossibility. Prior to joining Stanford, she completed an MSc in Social Anthropology with distinction at the University of Oxford and a joint honours BA in Anthropology and Political Science at McGill University.
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